Coming up: a portable Marshall speaker
by Volker Weber
I have a lot of headphones, but the Marshall Monitor Bluetooth is my goto headset. I prefer it over more expensive and better headphones, because it has exactly the right size to fit my head. It's not too small, it's not too big, it's crazy powerful, runs a day on a charge, and is easily controlled with a single knob. I connect it to my phone via Bluetooth and to my Surface via cable. If I need to waste time on a conf call, I will always pull out a Plantronics headset but most days, this is it.
Marshall Headphones is not the guitar amp company. It's Zound Industries, a swedish company with multiple brands, and they have licensed the Marshall brand and are using it for their loud products. And since I love the Monitor Bluetooth so much, I have decided I want to look at their speakers as well.
Marshall Headphones has started out with the Stanmore a few years ago. And they have built out that series with the small Acton and the mighty Woburn. They are all connected via Bluetooth and the Woburn goes up to a 110 db at 1m, which is crazy loud. You can also connect to it via RCA or optical cable. Marshall Headphones followed up with Wifi Connected versions of the Multiroom Acton, Multiroom Stanmore and Multiroom Woburn, which support Chromecast, Spotify Connect, and AirPlay. Next month the Acton and Stanmore come out as version II with Alexa. There you have it, three generations of Acton, Stanmore and Woburn, with Bluetooth, Wifi and Wifi/Alexa. All of these need to be connected to power.
The company also has two portable speakers, Stockwell and Kilburn. Kilburn is the larger one, and it is followed up by Kilburn II as of next week. This is the one I will be looking at, since any of the other ones do not stand a fighting chance against a built-out Sonos home.
Comments
The hotel I currently stay in quite regularly has the Acton standing in each room.
It normally takes up to 3 attempts to get it paired. Is very inconsistent with reconnecting and to hear radio on a decent level, you crank it up quite a lot to match a room level volume.
So from my current experience, it has a real nice design but the technical part of it is very bad.
Maybe I'm spoiled having a UE Mini Boom for traveling and Sonos at home.
Thanks Patrick, I will see how well Bluetooth works on the Kilburn II. The original Acton is pretty old by now. The Kilburn II is going to have a completely different chipset.
Love the design, and sound usually. Epic fail to have “the loudest” in its class only go to 10, it would have put a constant smile on people’s face if they’d “go to eleven”.
